Installing Ubuntu 7.04 on a ThinkPad T43

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Revision as of 09:53, 30 March 2007 by Tec (Talk | contribs) (→‎Active Protection System)
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Installation Log of Ubuntu 6.06 on a T43


ATTENTION!
BE CAREFUL, THIS IS STILL A DRAFT!


Overview

Worked right out of the box

  • 1400*1050 resolution
  • Battery Management
  • Ultra Nav (Trackpoint and synaptic touchpad)
  • WLAN (Atheros, IBM 11a/b/g Wireless LAN Mini PCI Adapter II)
  • Hibernate and Standby
  • Fn keys (switch between monitors untested)
  • Audio Keys
  • ThinkLight
  • ATI 3D Acceleration (Mobility Radeon X300)
  • AIGLX / Compiz

Was easy or required some work

  • Fingerprint reader
  • AIGLX / Beryl

Untested

  • middle key of Ultra Nav (Trackpoint) for scrolling
  • Forward/Backward keys, Access IBM Key
  • Bluetooth (light indicates working)
  • Modem
  • IrDA
  • TV out, VGA out
  • Active Protection System (acceleration sensor works 'out of the box' in edgy, but hard disk parking needs kernel recompile)

Failed / still requires work

Installation

I just installed Feisty using the graphical installer.

ATTENTION!
Installing grub to the MBR may hurt your Rescue 'n' Recovery Partition!

If you want to keep you Rescue 'n' Recovery Partition, read this blog entry.

Whatever you do, you should care about Backups etc. yourself. A starting point is given in Installing Ubuntu 6.10 on a ThinkPad T43#Installation

The only non-free driver that was activated was atheros for wifi access. For graphics the free ati/radeon driver was activated, the restricted ati alternative fglrx was installed but not enabled. I did not try it.

Configuration

3D Acceleration and Compiz

3D Acceleration and Compiz worked out of the box for me. Just activate it in the system menu under desktop effects. I had some minor issues, but I blame the beta status for that. To test if 3D Acceleration it works, if you have problems, type 

$ glxinfo | grep rendering

The answer should be: "direct rendering: Yes". If it says "No", you don't have 3D acceleration.

3D Acceleration Beryl

I just installed following packages and started beryl-manager. Everything just works out of the box. If you enable compiz effect in the gnome menu you can even swith between beryl, compiz and metacity (no effects) just using the beryl-manager applet. 

sudo  apt-get install beryl beryl-core beryl-manager beryl-plugins beryl-plugins-data beryl-settings beryl-settings-bindings

Active Protection System

TODO

The T43 has a great system to protect your hard disk, the Active Protection System APS. HDAPS and How to protect the harddisk through APS describe how you can use it.

Feisty comes with with the accelerometer installed but not activated. To test it activate the kernel module and use a neat program you find in hdaps-utils

To activate it, type: 

# sudo su
$ echo "hdaps" >> /etc/modules
$ exit
# sudo modprobe hdaps

For a nice 3D show type: 

# sudo apt-get install hdaps-utils
# hdaps-gl

Now you can evaluate acceleration of your Laptop. Your hard disk unfortunately still is not protected. To achive this, try How to protect the harddisk through APS or Installing_Ubuntu_6.06_on_a_ThinkPad_T43#Active_Protection_System or Howto for edgy.

Track Point Middle Key Scrolling

In my case the track point worked out of the box, but the middle mouse button for scrolling did not. How to configure the TrackPoint explains how to solve this. The steps you need to follow are in section "Using the X server (kernel 2.6.11+)". However you don't need to follow the steps in "EmulateWheelTimeout temporarily broken (-> fix for Ubuntu Dapper)" as this is fixed already if you have all your packages up-to-date.

Follow the instructions in the sections "Configure firefox for using trackpoint horizontal scrolling" and "Configure Opera for using trackpoint horizontal scrolling" as well, if you are using one of the two browsers.


Fingerprint Reader

How to enable the fingerprint reader has a good explanation for a very complicated way of activating your fingerprint reader using a restricted driver.

An alternative to this is available at [1]: How to enable the fingerprint reader with ThinkFinger provides more details.

Forward / Backward Keys, Access IBM

Just follow this HowTo for the configuration you prefer: How to get special keys to work

IrDA

Find information here: How to make use of IrDA

VGA out

I didn't try it, but it looks easy: How to enable VGA out

References


Hope this helped :-) tec

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